The Diary — Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?​

[Iconoclast]

The Barrett accusers do not consider the 1891 maroon diary to be evidence. What--or who-- has left you have that false impression?

Someone has misdirected your attention with that little red diary, has decoyed you down the garden path.

Don't let them do that.

If it does not concern you that Barrett’s request included 1890, you really should ask yourself why you might be ignoring it.

[caz]

As far as I know, it doesn't matter if an expert looks at a forged document one day after it's been forged or one year afterwards, or at least it didn't in 1992. There obviously weren't any reliable tools to enable them to differentiate between the two, other than perhaps a solubility test but not everyone seems to accept the result of the one that Baxendale did. So I'm not terribly impressed by the fact that the forger might only have just finished writing it before producing it. I suspect that's true of all or most forgers. They want to make their money as fast as they can.

Morning Herlock,

I just wanted to remind you that in this case, Mike Barrett would have wanted his wife's 'blind forgery' - if you believe RJ Palmer's theory has merit - to be mistaken for a document dating back to 1888, so there'd have been no benefit to him whatsoever if the experts in 1992 could not tell the difference between one penned yesterday and one penned a year ago. He'd have been hoping, on 13th April 1992, on the train to London, that nobody who might be invited to examine the diary that day, or in the days, weeks and months to come, would be able to distinguish between ink applied to paper in early April 1992, and ink applied when Maybrick was alive.

I still wonder what knowledge Mike would have had about such matters before you could Google it, and how confident he'd have been on a scale of one to ten, that it wouldn't go very quickly pear-shaped if he and Anne had created a document such as this one.

Surely, you have to take into account what the people who actually met or knew the Barretts would think of all this, and not just dismiss them as no more qualified, or even less qualified to comment, than those of you who don't know the real Mike or Anne from the mythical Adam and Eve - or the fictionalised Macbeth and Lady Macbeth if you prefer.

Love,

Caz
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